Wolfe Discussion

First part seems to be working. Lot more to come but time is in limited availability so will do it as I can.

Please be aware that I will be switching back and forth between themes so from one page to another things may be real broke at times. 😉

I have gotten the e-Commerce module/plugin installed and am going to try to get it set up tonight.

Look for the navigation to change quite a bit in the near future. Not sure how I am going to do it or what it will look like but the main page is too long and navagation between pages/posts isn’t working the way I want it to.

Pictures will change too. The way I was having to do them before was a bit of a pain, and now wordpress has thumbnailing built in. As is the picture upload and placement.

What reference books or materials do you, the Wolfe list members, have and/or have read and can recommend as being worth the purchase, concerning Rex Stout and Nero Wolfe?

So far I have gotten the following wonderful information:

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From Jonathan Levine

At Wolfe’s Door by Ken Van Dover
The Brownstone House of Nero Wolfe by Ken Darby
Stout Fellow by O.E. McBride
Nero Wolfe of West 35th St. by William S.Baring-Gould
Rex Stout by David Anderson
John McAleer’s biography of Mr. Stout

Jerome Berin

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From Linda Ciani we have:

The Nero Wolfe Companion books by the Rev. Frederick G. Gotwald are very interesting. The problem — they are very difficult to find!

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To which Jonathan replies:

That they are. But they are not reference books about NW, they are books that explain references to things in the books. They also have many mistakes.

Jonathan

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And last but certainly not least from Phil Fischer comes this exhaustive list:

While reading Please Pass The Guiltchapter 5 mentions the 14 x 26 Keraghan rug in the office. While out hunting books a while back I found a book by the name of Oriental Rugs In Colour by Preben Liebetrau and remembering the rugs mentioned in the Corpus I got the book. I just found it and upon looking don’t find Keraghan listed but there are 2 plates depicting Kirman Rugs from Iran.

Kirman Rugs

14. Kirman, Iran
The large town of Kirman in the south of Iran produces handsome and lustrous drawing room carpets in dense and strong qualities and many sizes, right up to 11’6″ X 16’6″ (3,50 X 5,00 m.). The foundation is cotton, the pile fine wool, and the knots Senneh. Pastel shades often appear in the ground of these rugs, for instance, a pale cream, green or blue. The design is very conservative, and old traditions have been continued in their floral patterns, especially in the stylized roses.

Kirman Rugs

15. Kirman, Iran
This is a typical Kirman rug, with a beautifully designed center medallion set off by the plain blue ground. The rug is enclosed in a broken floral border, thus exemplifying the Iranian combination of patterns. Such richly decorated rugs with flowers and flower-sprays scattered over the whole field are very popular in England, and have for many years been produced specially for the English market. Of course, not all the rug-making is done in Kirman itself; rugs are made in the surrounding country as well, but nearly all of them are marketed under the name of Kirman. An exception are rugs from the towns of Yezd and Raver situated north and south of Kinnan. They are usually described as ‘Kirman Yezd’ and ‘Kirman Raver’. It is not unusual to find people or animals in Kirman rugs.

UPDATE

Just got the following from Phil Fischer from the WolfeHounds email list. Thanks Phil!

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In “Might As Well Be Dead” the 14 x 26 rug is a feraghan

In “If Death Ever Slept” the 14 x 26 rug is a keraghan, it is misspelled.

In “Bullet For One” there is a kerman rug.

In “If Death Ever Slept” there is a kirman rug.

Kerman rugs come from Kerman province in southeastern Iran (whose capitol is also called Kerman).

Every April and probably again in October the 14 x 26 feraghan is sent out for cleaning and is replaced with two rugs, a kerman and a larger shirvan.

Wolfe also owns an 11 x 15 kashan rug which is installed in the third floor “south room”.

Below you will find the July 26, 2005 version of The Nero Wolfe Mailing List subscription information:

Please note – This site has no official standing with The Nero Wolfe Mailing List or any other group. Any information found here is provided by me for me to have a place to keep all my “stuff” so I can find it. 😉

Albert Freyer; Counselor at Law aka David (Dave) E. Patty

May Hawthorne reminded me, in the comments, that “Archie” AKA Terry Hagley, the founder of the Wolfe List, passed away in September of 2002 and that his email address and website address are inactive. I suspect that all of the email addresses other than the xxx.mirror.org addresses are likely to be incorrect. I am leaving the document as is and putting this warning here.

—

info
Welcome to WOLFEHOUNDS: The Nero Wolfe Mailing List! This is a
mailing list for the discussion of Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe mystery series and
related topics. This information is posted monthly, in response to requests
for the rules or guidelines for the list, and is also available at any time
be sending an “info” command to:

wolfe-list-request2@mirror.org

1. To post to the list, all you need to do is send your post to:

wolfe-list@mirror.org

and it will automatically be distributed to the folks on the list.

If you have any administrative details that you need to have dealt
with (address changes, subscribes, unsubscribes), send one of the following
commands to the automated subscription processor at:
wolfe-list-request2@mirror.org

subscribe
subscribe

Subscribe yourself (or if specified) to wolfe-list.
You will be sent a message with a password. You must send a
confirmation reply message to complete your subscription.

unsubscribe
unsubscribe

Unsubscribe yourself (or if specified) from wolfe-list.

who
Find out who is on the wolfe-list.

info
Retrieve the general introductory information for wolfe-list.

intro
Retrieve the introductory message sent to new subscribers.
Non-subscribers may not be able to retrieve this.

Commands should be sent in the body of your e-mail message.
Multiple commands can be processed provided each occurs on a separate line.
Commands in the “Subject:” line of your message will NOT be processed.

If you have any questions or problems using the list which need personal
assistance, please contact wolfe-list-admin@mirror.org

2. This List was founded in January 1996 by Terry Hagley
(hagley@eurekanet.com), by posting an announcement on a Sherlock Holmes
mailing list and rec.arts.mystery, which resulted in about a dozen
subscribers. The List was run off Terry’s home PC, until the growth of
subscribers neccessitated bringing automation to the List. The list went to
an automated bounce system in April 1996, thanks to John Santore
(jsbh+@andrew.cmu.edu), and had grown by February 1997 to 146 subscribers.
The List is now operated off mirror.org, courtesy of London Application
Solutions Inc and Ken Roberts (ken@mirror.org).

3. The subscribers to WOLFEHOUNDS are a chatty group, so expect at least
ten email messages daily. If this volume is beyond what you desire, you may
not wish to subscribe. Discussions are fairly freewheeling, and are
unmoderated.

4. Soon after subscribing to this list, you will receive a
registration form asking for your name, email address, and mailing address.
While it is not obligatory to provide this information, it will enable us to
get in touch with you if anything goes awry electronically at either end, and
we need to reestablish the list or your subscription to it. You are also
encouraged to select a nom de canon from the Nero Wolfe tales for your
use on the list, and the registration form will include those which have
already been chosen by others to help guide your selection. The list is
kept by Jon Lellenberg (jlellenb@capaccess.org), who around the end of
each month posts an updated list of names, locations (cities and states
only), and noms de canon. By agreement of the charter members of the List,
the nom Nero Wolfe is not available.

5. Generally, we discuss the books in order, devoting two weeks
to each novel, and one week to each novelette. However, as noted below,
all posts are welcome, even if not related to the book under discussion at
the time.

6. All comments, discussion, or banter relating to Nero Wolfe are
welcome. Flippant or trivial posts are as welcome as scholarly posts.

7. Want list, buy/sell lists, and the like that are related to
Wolfe/Stout material is permitted.

8. Special projects: Several members of the list are also
engaged in certain projects that may be of interest to other list members:

-Al Diamond’s (TKHH10A@prodigy.com) outstanding piece of Nerovian
scholarship, The Nero Wolfe Bibliography, is posted to all members of the
list around the 15th of each month. The most recent copy is always posted,
as Al continually updates this fine project.

Chapter 3 starts off with Archie going to look at the scene of the crime.

“The road from Lame Horse to the turnoff to the Bar JR Ranch and Lily’s cabin doesn’t stop there. It keeps going for three more miles and stops for good at the Fishtail River, and there, on the right, is Bill Farnham’s dude ranch.”

So as the road winds it’s 3 miles from Lily’s to Bill Farnham’s.

He has a brief interlude with Mrs. Amory, of one of the people staying at Farnham’s, in which she tells him she is too lazy to pull her skirt down and he offers to do it for her only to be told not to bother. So he leaves a message with her for Bill that he is leaving his car there and climbing up to the scene of the crime.

He leaves and reminisces about poaching young Blue Grouse with Lily as he climbs up to Blue Grouse Ridge, the scene of the crime. He also points out that he could have gotten there from the ranch or cabin but that it was 2 times further and rough going part of the way.

He says the ridge is about a mile from Farnham’s and so it must be about 2 miles from the ranch. He does point out that the trip took 3 hours but as I read it that is driving time too.

On getting there he finds some blood and then notes the other signs where people came in to haul the body out.

I’m gonna let Archie speak this next bit. Just too good to paraphrase. 😉

“It would have been a cinch for even a New York character like me to get within forty yards of the target, let alone a man who knew how to stalk deer and elk. But forty yards is too far to count on a hand gun, so it had been a rifle, and in the middle of a Montana summer nobody goes out with a rifle for anything with four legs, except maybe a coyote, and you don’t climb Blue Grouse Ridge for a coyote.”

After throwing a rock at a chipmunk and missing (on purpose? as he says that at the cabin some of his his best friends were chipmunks) he heads back to the ranch.

Having gotten hot and sweaty he changes into “a PSI shirt and brown woolen slacks.”

I get the slacks part but – What is a “PSI” shirt? Google comes up with “Alpha Kappa Psi” shirt but Archie didn’t go to college so I don’t think that’s the answer. Anyone?

We get to see that there is a connecting door (!) between Archie’s and Lily’s rooms. I don’t remember any other book in the corpus that this level of intimacy is acknowledged. Anyone?

Archie tells Lily about Carol swearing on the saddle and they agree that she was telling the truth. There is a lot more here, but you’re gonna have to read the book for the details, as well as a lot I am leaving out…

They eat supper and we get a glimpse into Diana’s empty head (?) as she flirts and poises while eating. More banter with Wade and her and he heads into town for the evening.

At this point he tells us that he spun his wheels for the next 4 days and goes on to describe part of one of the wasted days which he says may as well be that Saturday evening.

This is where Archie visits the WOODROW STEPANIAN HALL OF CULTURE (caps his) and Vawter’s which he describes as a high-ceilinged room a hundred feet long and nearly as wide and goes on to describe the contents which he says would take several pages to inventory.

Talks to several folks and gets nothing. Goes over to the Hall of Culture and watches the dancers for a while and calls it an evening. For a description of the Hall and the evening, read the book.. 😉

He adds another interlude into this chapter about a visit on Tuesday morning from Luther Dawson (defense council) and Thomas R. Jessup (county attorney) who arrived in the same car. After getting Lily’s dander up asking questions that are out of line, they leave and Archie explains to Lily that he had mailed a letter to Wolfe that he would have gotten the previous day (Monday) so that it was most likely Wolfe that had stirred up the attorney(s).

There is a LOT more going on here. The above paragraph covers nearly 6 pages of good reading. Remember folks, I’m just hitting the high points, so read the book!

The chapter ends on Wednesday evening around 8 o’clock with a taxi coming up the drive. The driver sticks his head out the window and asks if this is Lily Rowan’s place. Archie tells it best:

I opened the door and stepped out and said yes, and the rear door of the taxi opened and a man climbed out, backwards. His big broad behind was Nero Wolfe’s, and when he straightened up and turned around, so was his big broad front. Lily, at my elbow, said, “the mountain comes to Mohammed,” and we crossed the terrace to meet him.

And so ends chapter 3. At 18 pages it is twice as long as either the first or second chapter. A lot gets covered but there is still a lot to go over. And Wolfe just came into the picture.

This book has 25 chapters although the last isn’t even a page long. We have another 18 days to cover 22 chapters, so some days you get one and some days two.

This great list is by our own Inspector Cramer AKA Dot Moran. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do! Dot can be reach via email at: dotbooks@intnet.net.

Wolfehounds:
I have completed rereading and listing the times that NW leaves the
brownstone, and doesn’t. My lists cover 74 novels/short stories numbered as per Dan Augustine’s (thanks Dan) August 1998 revised chronology.

Here are the results:

Nero Wolfe leaves the brownstone: 35 times
Nero Wolfe does NOT leave the Brownstone: 39 times
For a total of 74 stories/books

Was putting some other stuff on here but ran into a database problem so am going to regroup and see what else I can do.

The nerowolfe.freeservers.com site has now has over 130,000 hits since December 8, 1999. Or thats what the counter shows. Didn’t realize it was that popular.

Hope this site will work out a bit better. It’s a whole lot easier for me to update. Now to get the rest of the Stout books scanned and into posts. I am running into a fair number of Wolfe that I am going to sell. Just got to get the paypal shopping cart links installed.